Jim Cramer Loves The Big Sh*tpile; He Loved Countrywide Too

CNBC's Jim Cramer was on Tweety's show telling us how great a deal the Wall Street Bailout is. He went as far to say as he hopes he can get in on the action. I have two reactions. The first is why doesn't Cramer raise money and buy some of the Sh*tpile if he loves it so much? Why don't other Wall Street types buy some of the Sht*tpile?

My second reaction is to remind you of Cramer's "prescience" on the value of the Big Sh*tpile, via Atrios:

I used to be a securities class-action lawyer. When we would research the history of companies that went belly-up due to fraud, one thing we would ALWAYS find in the news archives was a column by Jim Cramer talking about what an awesome stock it was. Some of my colleagues think he is smart, but I see him as defining the category of Always Wrong.

Incidentally, there really are a number of players on Wall Street who think these distressed securities are a great bargain opportunity. Now, whether they're the smart ones or not is not for me to say. But the reason they're not buying is that there really is a lack of available capital out there.

Tweety was enamored with him, that's for sure. From my limited grasp of this melt-down, the reporter seemed to be making some cogent points. I'd be interested in what others thought about his analysis.

As for Cramer, I automatically lower the volume on my set when he appears.

after sifting through 246 stock recommendations over a period of about 11 weeks, three researchers from the kellogg school of management claim to have found that buying mr. cramer's televised picks is a losing proposition.

from their paper:

taken together, our results suggest that the aggregate losers in our event study are the mad money viewers who decide to buy the recommended securities when the markets open the following day, and that the winners are the market makers and arbitraguers who sell the overpriced recommended stocks on day 1, as well as the traders who sell the recommended stocks on days 2 through 12.